Peter Overby
Peter Overby has covered Washington power, money, and influence since a foresighted NPR editor created the beat in 1994.
Overby has covered scandals involving House Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton, lobbyist Jack Abramoff and others. He tracked the rise of campaign finance regulation as Congress passed campaign finance reform laws, and the rise of deregulation as Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions rolled those laws back.
During President Trump's first year in office, Overby was on a team of NPR journalists covering conflicts of interest sparked by the Trump family business. He did some of the early investigations of dark money, dissecting a money network that influenced a Michigan judicial election in 2013, and — working with the Center for Investigative Reporting — surfacing below-the-radar attack groups in the 2008 presidential election.
In 2009, Overby co-reported Dollar Politics, a multimedia series on lawmakers, lobbyists and money as the Senate debated the Affordable Care Act. The series received an award for excellence from the Capitol Hill-based Radio and Television Correspondents Association. Earlier, he won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for his coverage of the 2000 elections and 2001 Senate debate on campaign finance reform.
Prior to NPR, Overby was an editor/reporter for Common Cause Magazine, where he shared an Investigative Reporters and Editors award. He worked on daily newspapers for 10 years, and has freelanced for publications ranging from Utne Reader and the Congressional Quarterly Guide To Congress to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.
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The former president's foundation ended years of secrecy by naming its donors. The information dump came about to stave off problems that could sink Hillary Clinton's Cabinet job. The list included enough big money and enough big names to catch the attention of conservatives, journalists and bloggers.
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The Obama campaign's post-election report shows that he raised nearly $750 million in his run for the White House. During the course of the campaign, he gathered 4 million donors and his fundraising surpassed the combined total of all the candidates in 2004.
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Washington is busy speculating on how President-elect Barack Obama might import his high-tech campaign methods into government.
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Technically speaking, the Obama campaign had two crown jewels: a database with the e-mail addresses of 10 million supporters and an online network that mobilized voters. What will become of this machine as the president-elect moves to the White House?
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Although the Obama campaign's $66 million in August may not be enough to maintain his advantage over the combined funds of the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee, liberal 527 groups may steal the spotlight with their anti-McCain ads.
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Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin begins her vice presidential campaign as a self-proclaimed reformer. But as a mayor and as governor, she defended the pork brought home by Alaska's congressional delegation, and even hired a lobbyist to get more.
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Independent groups have yet to unveil an ad as damaging as the Swift Boat Veterans spot that hurt Sen. John Kerry's presidential bid in 2004. But as the summer goes on, more groups are producing radio and TV spots targeting the presidential race and key Senate battles.
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Homeowners might think of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as just the big dogs of the mortgage business, but in Washington, D.C., they're known as big players in lobbying. The two companies managed to stave off government regulation for years by lobbying hard — and spending generously.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was some $10 million in debt at the end of March. Then she lent her campaign $11 million. The campaign won't say what her total debt is. How might Clinton go about paying off some of the bills?
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After six days of silence, Page Gardner, president of Women's Voices Women Vote, defended the group and its voter-registration activities in an interview with NPR. Gardner said that Women's Voices registered 26,000 North Carolinians in time to vote in the primary and that African-Americans make up 57 percent of all those registered by the group.